Welcome back!
Every weekday, I post–on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram–an essay from my archive (sometimes more than one), along with new work published that week. I realised it might make sense to compile these links at the end of every week, so that readers who missed them at the time can catch up. This week’s update and roundup of links is a bit different because my break was interrupted when I broke the internet.
More on that below but for now, to reiterate:
You’re welcome to follow me on any of these social media platforms, but please note that I’m no longer accepting new friend requests on FB, unless I’ve met you and know you personally. You can, however, still follow me there without us directly “friending” each other.
I publish new work every Tuesday, generally by noon CST. This is never just some “I watched a show/read something/saw a pigeon on the street and here are some random thoughts” piece slapped together in an hour but an actual, fully formed essay that I work on exactly as I would for any publication. If you like what you read, please consider supporting me in any way you can. On Twitter, I schedule posts through the day and night, so you may see some repetition of posts. I don’t “shitpost” or tweet needlessly, so please don’t follow me on social media if you expect to see me dropping opinions all the time online. I say something when there’s a felt need to say something. I am, as in life, sometimes silent for hours.
Now, as to The Thing That Happened.
This last fortnight was intense, exhausting, and ultimately very revealing about the current state of gay politics and “left” politics in general. Current Affairs published my my review “What Chasten Buttigieg Has to Tell Us,” about Buttigieg’s “memoir” in its most recent print edition. It posted the essay online a fortnight and I broke the internet after Buttigieg took umbrage (unsurprising since I point out that it’s a very boring book with terrible politics). As is fairly typical of Twitterstorms, my words were ripped out of context and people began diving into all my older work to find examples of how I had been responsible for the Crash of 1929, the Lindbergh kidnapping, the wreck of The Titanic, and Pearl Harbor. The waves of toxicity were intense, and came from several quarters (including many people who otherwise fondly imagine themselves as “socialists”).
I’ll write a separate essay on the furore but for now, I will simply say: there was a lot of tone and sex policing. Of course, most people had either not read the essay or wilfully chose to misread it in order to perform their “support” a gay man, Chasten Buttigieg, who distorted an essay about his book in a way that cast him and his husband—two powerful white gay men in DC—as hapless citizens targeted by an evil force (me). And, of course, many hundreds more saw the chance to engage in some performative trolling. All because I had dared, dared to suggest that a gay politician and his husband might be…a gay politician and his husband. Without any substance from the essay with which to criticise me, people delved into my personal life. Enter Jeff Edwards, a senior organiser at UIC United Faculty (which represents faculty at the University of Illinois at Chicago), who once again emerged to pass on what he claimed were details about my sex life, to prove that I’m not authentically queer (and no one seemed to want to admit that even if this were true, my critique still needed to be judged on its validity, not my identity). This is not the first time Edwards has waded into this sewage, and he was in fact simply repeating the claims he had made over a decade ago. I wrote “Fuck Love” in 2011, an essay about that particular moment and the larger context of the many kinds of abuse that exist in queer, radical organising spaces.
That a white, gay man—one whose close professional and personal associations include radical queer prison abolitionists and many so-called gay and straight “lefties” among UIC’s faculty—can get away with this kind of misogyny more than once is testimony to what I’ve long been saying about Chicago: the city functions like a plantation, and white gay men are among its overseers, policing the boundaries for any deviation from what they think of as the norm. A certain kind of gay man will expound endlessly on the (all too sadly true) history of gay people being brutalised and stigmatised for their sexual acts, and will also not hesitate to demand that women prove their sexuality to them.
I’ve also long held that supposedly radical queers and lefties have a conflicted relationship with race and misogyny. They want to be seen as being against both. But when required to show up and decry examples of it in their midst, they choose to stay silent, hoping that the squalls will blow over and that they can return to the status quo. Edwards’s friends and associates have known about his rant for a long time—and I’ve even raised it with some of them, to no avail. It’s clearly not a problem for them, or for any of Edwards’s colleagues at UICUF, a union that, I suspect, has many queer women in its ranks in 2023. Perhaps UICUF’s application for membership includes a question like, “If you say you are a lesbian, please bring photographic evidence.” But the issue is far beyond Edwards and his comrades (I bring up his affiliations because I don’t think the man belongs in any space where there are women present). Several self-described “socialists,” straight and queer, jumped on this “Yasmin Nair is a fake queer” (actual words) bandwagon. What this tells us is that it may be 2023, but even the supposed left is still mired in an archaic and dangerously retrograde concept of sexuality that would shock Alfred Kinsey. Undoubtedly, some of these lefties are the same ones who, when convenient, will also declare themselves queer in the most expansive sense of the word or cheer on those who do; for them, this occasion was simply an excuse to join the hordes because of their dislike for me (ex-lovers and wanna-be lovers were among this lot, as were those I’ve revealed as Great Purloiners).
Which raises the question: if your support for queerness is only about supporting the people you like, do you really have a politics of sexuality at all? And in that case, how far might you go in your hatred towards individuals you don’t like?
All of this was very reminiscent of Cerise and the Walk of Shame in Game of Thrones.
It was also bizarre because when Edwards slipped this bit of information to someone, people began to spread a screenshot of the email where he “revealed” my life details to the now dead (and utterly odious and spiteful) Doug Ireland. I stared at the screenshot when I first saw it, because the font and background seemed so familiar, and realised: it was taken from my very own essay, the aforementioned “Fuck Love.” And just like that, Game of Thrones turned into this classic Witch Burning trial from Monty Python.
As for tone: Christopher Hitchens had truly horrible politics towards the end of his life and expounded on them with great contempt and much snark, but with a properly Imperialist accent, and as a man—if this essay had been written by him, people would be orgasmically fanning themselves and begging for more.
What happened this past fortnight happened for a number of reasons that reveal the strange contours of what passes for “gay politics” online and in the real world where mainstream gay men in particular have very little that they can fight for now, after having achieved the Holy Trinity of Gay Marriage, Hate Crimes Legislation, and Inclusion in the Military. Going after me for some made up threat to a powerful gay white man and his husband is a distraction and re-establishes gay men as perpetual victims when they are now, in fact, among the most powerful lobbying groups in the country (and have been, for a long time), as my many essays on the subject have pointed out.
There’s also, of course, the matter of putting me in my place. A brown queer woman who dares to write a critical, perceptive, and very funny essay (like Hitchens and his ilk, I don’t suffer from false modesty) about what is in fact the political manifesto of one of the worst political candidates who just happens to be gay is of course excoriated for her “tone”: how dare she talk back? How dare she not just stand around in a sari, her lush, long, dark, jasmine-scented braids swinging every which way, a plate of pappadams in her hennaed hands, bowing her head while making gentle clucking noises to her white masters, reassuring them that, oh, yes, absolutely, life in America is every queer woman’s dream? Namaste, namaste, namaste. Swagatham, swagatham, swagatham. Please never stop reminding me of how privileged I am to even be able to write about such things, my lords.
As noted, I will be writing an essay on all this. I’ve also embarked on a social experiment, where I engage—or try to—a good number of the trolls, including the most hateful ones, who attacked me. I’m not trying to be friends with them, but I have some other objectives in mind, especially as all forms of social media seem to dwindle and sputter. The problem is not that we talk too much about social media but that we don’t talk about it the right way, as an insidious system of power relations. I’m interested in exploring what this incident reveals about so much: the contemporary gay “movement” (which lacks any real causes and attaches itself to trans issues as a funding opportunity), the state of the “socialist” left, and so much more. I have three books to work on right now, so there’s enough to occupy my attention and time, and I also want a lot of this to just sit in my head while I think through which parts are more or less significant, what to emphasise, what to leave out entirely perhaps.
If you’re interested in what happened, you can just go to Twitter and type in my name, or go to the Current Affairs announcements about my piece and fall down various rabbit holes. I’ve taken many hundreds of screenshots for the record. As you can tell from one of the comments that I used to illustrate this essay, things got very dark (when I confronted one person about this kind of toxicity, she responded with a comment to the effect that I deserved it).
Most of all: note that Current Affairs has stood by me through all of this. If you like my work, please support them with a subscription and/or a donation.
But, to the work at hand: here’s a list of links I posted this past week.
My brand new essay is on the show Justified, both iterations: “Necessary Evil: Did Justified Lost Its Way?”
Once again, my review of Chasten Buttigieg’s YA memoir, “What Chasten Buttigieg Has to Tell Us.”
“Twitter Is Not Your Writing Life.” Please note that I’ve changed the title from “On Writing, Part 1…” I’m going to be writing a lot about writing, and it seems pointles and confusing to number the essays in any way.
“What Really Happened at Current Affairs?” This is a lengthy and exhaustive investigation into the incident of August 2021 (there’s a summary version linked in the first paragraph), which took 18 months and the careful consideration of over a dozen editors. I keep reposting this because a lot of people have asked about what happened. As for an update: I’ve promised that I will record anything that the board and staff present, with proof, that might challenge what I’ve written on the matter. So far, no one has come forward—but the board and staff have, together and individually, been murmuring and muttering online, making personal comments about me and CA staff. I’m not going to bother repeating them here because personal attacks are designed to be a distraction from the issues (I will, however, address the Karen-like racism of one of them in another essay because I think it’s symptomatic of how a certain kind of “socialist feminist” operates on the left, and this behaviour needs to be called out). The audience for this essay is: people who’d like an honest appraisal of what happened. It’s not meant for internet trolls or vengeful purloiners but the adults in the room. Every now and then, someone will pop up to say, in response to a posting of the essay, “Well, I just don’t believe what’s laid out here.” Which is like staring at a body splayed on a city pavement with a knife sticking out of its back and insisting that, clearly, the victim died of salt water drowning and, also, clearly, that a vampire drained its blood.
“Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore Talks Faggotry, San Francisco,” an interview with the author. Her new book, Touching the Art, is out in November, and I cannot wait.
My older essay on Pete Buttigieg, “American Gay: Pete Buttigieg and the Politics of Forgetting.”
And this, “Pete Buttigieg Is Still Playing.”
Here’s a podcast I did with the always excellent Karma Chávez, on Trauma Feminism.
And here’s the essay it references, “The Perils of Trauma Feminism.”
Here’s “Fuck Love.”
On the internet and how it makes and breaks you, here’s “Suey Park and the Afterlife of Twitter.”
Also on the internet and the concept of shame (I’ve seen this circus before): “A World of Shame: Time, Belonging, and Social Media.”
Anyway, have a great week. And remember: sometimes even criminal masterminds just need a belly rub.
Once again:
Current Affairs has stood by me through all of this. If you like my work, please support them with a subscription and/or a donation.
Also again: I could always do with support of any kind, thank you.
